DURING SPELLS OF heat like the one we’re experiencing right now, there is a specific complaint that is commonly levelled at media organisations. 

It happens when a headline about record-breaking heat, or weeks without rain, is accompanied by a photo of a melting 99 or throngs of revellers taking to the beach. People don’t like it because they believe it masks the real story, which is not ‘Oh good, the sun is out, let’s all take our tops off’ but rather ‘Oh dear, the world is ending (let’s all take our tops off)’. 

In a rare move for this column, I will say one brief thing in defence of the mainstream media, which is that, in fairness, when it’s hot, people do be eating ice creams. They do be heading to the beach. It’s not like those photos don’t reflect very real phenomena. People enjoy the heat! That’s the god’s honest truth. Beaches and beer gardens don’t stay empty because we’re all so worried about the catastrophe inherent in the sunshine, though most of us very much are. 

However, this week we have once and for all been presented with the kind of images that should be used when the next heatwaves crash down upon us, and crash they most certainly will. These images are coming out of Slievenamon, Co Tipperary, where a wildfire has been raging since Monday and continues to burn, with only some hope emerging that it will be extinguished in the coming days.. When one watches the firefighters work tirelessly to put out the blaze, it’s hard not to feel mournful. All of that water that could have been used to keep our data centres cool… Wasted.

While it is true that most of us do enjoy the various novelties afforded to us by weeks of sunshine, it is fires tearing through our forests, smoke travelling miles, vulnerable people forced to take further precautions, state resources being drained, and inevitably threat to life that paint a more accurate picture of the climate crisis that is currently giving us a polite taster of what is coming down the tracks. And we can’t even spray each other with our hosepipes to take our mind off it. 

The climate outlook is bleak, to say the least, but there was good news on the housing front this week when Minister for Housing James Browne confirmed that the state will be providing every home that everyone needs. Oh, no, wait, sorry, he actually specifically said that they won’t be doing that. 

One of the comments that the minister threw against the wall was that the State “cannot provide every home that everybody needs”. First and foremost, it’s never a good situation when they start arguing back against a point that nobody was making in the first place. There is nobody who believes the state has the capacity to meet 100% of Ireland’s housing needs (though that would be nice, for the record). 

What is similarly funny is that, well, the State is absolutely nowhere near doing that anyway. Even if people were calling for it, there has been no suggestion in the last 15 years that the government has ever had any intention of building anywhere near all of the houses that Ireland needs. This was not something that needed to be restated. 

Last year, the state built a quarter of the new homes that went on the Irish housing market. That’s extremely welcome! If you were baking a delicious cake and Minister for Housing James Browne came along and did 25% of the work for you, cracked some eggs, a bit of stirring, softened up the margarine, you might say ‘Hey, that was pretty helpful, Minister for Housing James Browne’. 

What would be less appealing is if it was Minister for Housing James Browne’s job to make sure that everyone in Ireland had access to adequate and affordable cakes – Minister for Cakes, if you will – and instead of doing that, he helped you with 25% of your cake, then went to lay down on the couch and said ‘Look, that’s really about as much as you can expect of me’. 

The minister was speaking in the context of making it easier for private developers to build more homes in Ireland. It is no secret that ‘Can’t someone else do it?’ has long been the ideological position of this government (and that of its previous iterations) when it comes to housing. The problem is that even when the government is allowed to advance its preferred model of house-building, it still comes couched in excuses. 

Speaking on Wednesday, the minister also made the argument that the war in the Middle East is having knock-on effects for home-building in Ireland. Is it just me, or do you get the feeling that they start rubbing their hands together whenever there’s some kind of global catastrophe at which they can lay the blame for their own very longstanding failings? 

But here’s the thing. If it was hard to build houses in 2016 because we were still coming out of austerity, and it was hard to build houses in 2018 because housing can’t be fixed overnight, and it was hard to build houses in 2020 because of Covid, and it was hard to build houses in 2022 because of the war in Ukraine, and it was hard to build houses in 2024 because of an increasing population, and it’s hard to build houses in 2026 because of Iran, well then, maybe you’re just not much of a problem-solver.

Maybe, after a certain point, you have to decide whether either building or facilitating the building of an appropriate supply of houses is actually a priority or not. Whether we are prepared to make choices to actually deliver houses or not. Real tough choices, not like the choice of whether to give developers one tax break or a different tax break, but choices like requisitioning derelict properties, preventing international funds from buying up estates’ worth of houses for the purposes of profiteering, and meaningfully tackling the explosion of short-term letting through platforms like Airbnb. 

If matters such as climate and housing make you feel as though you have very little control over your own face, there was a nice little salve for you this week. In what is great news for the ‘put the animals back on the money’ lobby (of which I am a proud member), the European Central Bank has announced that we will soon be getting new euro banknotes. There are 10 prospective designs which are being put to a public vote, for bills which will carry such pleasantly European imagery as cool birds (I guess the birds must be European), Leonardo da Vinci, and a guy playing the saxophone. 

You can check out the banknotes here and vote for your favourite, though, at the end of the day, there is no option to vote for an image that would truly be representative of Europe over the coming years. Then again, who wants to see a wildfire on their money?